Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (89 page)

It would be going too far to suggest that William already had in mind the unification of Germany by armed Prussian force – his thinking on the German question was much more open-ended than that. Yet there is no doubt that he was a consistent enthusiast for the idea of a closer German union of some kind, and that he envisaged this as occurring under Prussian captaincy. William had shared his brother’s enthusiasm for the ill-fated Erfurt Union and was disappointed by the Prussian retreat at Olmütz. ‘Whoever wants to govern Germany must conquer it first,’ he had written in 1849. ‘Whether the time for this unification has come, God alone knows; but that Prussia is destined to stand at the summit of Germany is an underlying fact of our history. But when and how? That is the question.’ During his posting to the Rhineland as military governor in 1849, William cultivated contacts with ‘small-German’ liberal enthusiasts of a Prussian-led union. ‘Prussia’s historical development shows that it is destined to lead Germany,’ he wrote in April 1851.
⁷

In order to meet the challenges of a more aggressive German policy, Prussia needed a flexible and highly effective military instrument. William and his military advisers aimed to double the size of the Prussian army by raising the number of recruits in each annual levy, extending the period of basic training by six months to three years and lengthening the period of service in the regular army reserve from two to five years. The regent also proposed to draw a clearer line between the regular army and the Landwehr, which was to be separated from the front line and regular reserve units and relegated to a subordinate position at the rear.

The government’s call for military reform was not in itself particularly controversial. Military expenditure had been in relative decline since 1848 and there was broad support across the liberal majority in the parliament for the idea that Prussia needed a stronger army if it was to remain capable of independent action. The events of 1859, moreover, produced a remarkable mobilization of liberal nationalist opinion across northern Germany, culminating in the foundation of the National
Society (
Nationalverein
) in September 1859. Led by the Hanoverian nobleman Rudolf von Bennigsen, this was an elite body of several thousand parliamentary deputies, university professors, lawyers and journalists, whose purpose was to lobby the Prussian government on behalf of the small-German cause.

The real problem lay in the question of the political relationship between the army and the parliament. Three aspects of the regent’s reform programme particularly antagonized the liberals. The first was the plan to do away with what remained of the Landwehr’s independence. The military chiefs viewed the Landwehr as the defunct remnant of a bygone era, but for many liberals it remained a potent embodiment of the ideal of a people’s army. The second bone of contention was the regent’s insistence on a three-year training period for soldiers of the line. Liberals rejected this in part because of the cost implications, and in part because they believed – with some justice – that the three-year period was intended less as a military than as a political measure, to ensure that soldiers were imbued with conservative and militarist values, as well as trained to make war. Underlying both these issues was the central question of the monarch’s unique, extra-constitutional power of command – the
Kommandogewalt
.
⁸

Conflict over the military was pre-programmed into the Prussian political system after 1848. The issue had both a constitutional and a broader cultural dimension. The constitutional problem was simply that the monarch and the parliament had potentially conflicting rights over the army. The monarch was responsible for command functions and in general for the composition and functionality of the military establishment. But it was the parliament that controlled funding. From the crown’s point of view, the army was an organization bound in personal loyalty to the monarch and quite independent of the parliament. Liberal parliamentarians, by contrast, took the view that their budgetary powers implied a limited right to co-determine the character of the army. This implied not only policing expenditure, but also ensuring that the army reflected the values of the broader political culture – this latter issue was the tripwire that had precipitated the crisis of the Berlin parliament in 1848. On both sides, the issues involved were of constitutive importance. William insisted that the
Kommandogewalt
was an unalienable attribute of his sovereignty, while the liberals saw that the curtailment of their
budgetary powers or the creation of a reactionary praetorian guard honed for the purpose of domestic repression would make a nonsense of the powers granted to parliament under the new constitution.

The military-constitutional conflict that resulted gradually brought the Prussian constitutional system created in 1848 to a standstill. Early in 1860, the government presented two bills to parliament, one outlining reforms and the other approving funds. William saw these bills as distinct in their constitutional status; it was permissible for the parliament to have a say in the question of financing, since budgetary powers were essential attributes of the assembly. On the other hand, he did not recognize the right of the deputies to tamper with the details of the proposed reform itself, which fell, as he saw it, within the sphere of his power of command. The parliament responded to this gambit by making only a provisional grant of extra monies – tactically an unwise step, as it turned out, since it permitted the government to go ahead with the first phase of the reforms, even though final approval had not yet been given.

A process of political radicalization set in among the liberals. In January, a group of seventeen deputies broke off from the main body of the liberal faction to become the core of the new Progressive Party (
Fortshrittspartei
). Thinking that a more conservative parliament might give the administration an easier ride, William dissolved the parliament and called for new elections. The new chamber returned at the end of 1861 was even more resolutely liberal than the old, with over 100 Progressive Party members. The conservative faction, who had ruled the roost in the 1850s, were cut back to a rump of only fifteen members. The new chamber was no more willing to approve the military reforms than its predecessor; in the spring of 1862 it too was dissolved. The new elections of May 1862 merely confirmed the intractability of the standoff. More than 230 of the 325 deputies belonged to liberal factions.

Among the men who ran Prussia’s military establishment there were some who now favoured an all-out break with the constitutional system. Of these, the most influential was the chief of the military cabinet, Edwin von Manteuffel, cousin of the minister-president, whose conservative reformism had done so much to secure the new constitutional system after the 1848 revolutions. Edwin was both more charismatic and less politically flexible than his cousin. He was an army man of the old school who equated his relationship with the monarch with the fealty
of a German tribesman to his chieftain. Contemporary prints show an upright, hyper-masculine figure with thick curling hair, the lower half of the face concealed behind a hedge of dense beard.
⁹
As a member of the military cabinet, a body attached directly to the person of the king, he stood completely outside the parliamentary/constitutional order.

Manteuffel could be ruthless in defence of his ‘honour’ and that of the Prussian army (which he appears to have seen as essentially the same thing). In the spring of 1861, when a liberal city councillor by the name of Karl Twesten published an article criticizing the proposed military reforms and attacking Manteuffel personally for seeking to alienate the army from the people, the general offered the councillor the choice between a full public retraction and a duel. Unwilling to endure the humiliation of a retraction, Twesten chose the duel, though he was no marksman. The councillor’s bullet flew wide, while the general’s drilled his opponent through the arm. The episode highlighted not just the polarization generated by the military question, but the increasingly raw style of public life in post-1848 Prussia.

There was a moment of collective paranoia in the early months of 1862 when Manteuffel’s extreme views enjoyed a certain resonance among conservatives close to the monarch, but the post-revolutionary consensus held firm and the general’s ‘great hour’ never arrived.
¹⁰
Neither King William (Frederick William IV had died in January 1861) nor the majority of his political and military advisers seriously contemplated an all-out break with the constitution. The minister of war, Albrecht von Roon, the chief architect of the proposed reforms, preferred to search for a compromise that would spare the system while preserving the essence of the reform programme.
¹¹
Even King William found it easier to imagine his own voluntary departure from office than to contemplate a return to absolutism. By September 1862, he appeared to be on the point of abdicating in favour of his son, Crown Prince Frederick William, who was known to be sympathetic to the liberal position. It was Albrecht von Roon who persuaded the king to step back from the brink and adopt a measure of last resort: the appointment of Otto von Bismarck to the minister-presidency of Prussia.

45.
Otto von Bismarck at the age of thirty-two.
Woodcut, after an anonymous drawing from 1847.

Who was Otto von Bismarck? Let us begin with a letter he wrote in the spring of 1834, when he was just nineteen years old. His school-leaving certificate had been delayed; as a result, doubts arose about whether he would be able to matriculate in the University of Berlin. In this transitional moment, forced into idleness and full of uncertainty about what the future held, the young Bismarck was moved to reflect on what would become of him if he failed to gain entry to university. From the family estate at Kniephof he penned the following lines to his school friend Scharlach:

I shall amuse myself for a few years waving a sword at raw recruits, then take a wife, beget children, till the soil and undermine the morals of my peasantry by the inordinate distillation of spirits. So, if in 10 years’ time you should happen to find yourself in the neighbourhood, I invite you to commit adultery with an easy and curvaceous young woman selected from the estate, to drink as much potato brandy as you fancy and to break your neck out hunting as often as you see fit. You will find here a fleshy home-guard officer with a moustache that curses and swears till the earth trembles, cultivates a proper repugnance to Jews and Frenchmen, and thrashes his dogs and domestics with egregious brutality
when bullied by his wife. I shall wear leather trousers, make a fool of myself at the Stettin wool market and when people address me as baron I shall stroke my moustache benignly and knock a bit off the price; I shall get pissed on the king’s birthday and cheer him vociferously and the rest of the time I shall sound off regularly and my every other word will be: ‘Gad what a splendid horse!’
¹²

This letter is worth citing at such length because it demonstrates how much ironic distance there was in the young Bismarck’s perception of his own social milieu – the milieu of the East-Elbian Junkers. Bismarck often liked to play the part of the red-necked
Krautjunker
of the Prussian boondocks, but in reality he was a rather untypical example of the type. His father was the real thing: he was descended from five centuries of noble East-Elbian landowners. But his mother’s family carried the imprint of a different tradition. Bismarck’s mother, Wilhelmine Mencken, was the descendant of an academic family from Leipzig in Saxony. Her grandfather had been a professor of law who entered the employ of the Prussian state to serve as cabinet secretary under Frederick the Great.
¹³

It was Wilhelmine Mencken who made the key educational decisions for her sons; Bismarck consequently received a rather uncharacteristic upbringing for a member of his class: he began, not with Cadet School, but with a classic bourgeois education as a boarder at the Plammann Institute in Berlin – a school for the sons of senior civil servants. From there he progressed to the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium, and later to the universities of Göttingen (1832–3) and Berlin (1834–5). There followed a four-year period of civil service training in Aachen and Potsdam. Bored by the monotony and the lack of personal autonomy that were the hallmarks of civil service training, young Otto retired, to the astonishment and dismay of his family, to work on his own estate at Kniephof, where he stayed from 1839 to 1845. During this long interlude, he played the Junker in heroic style; these were years of heavy eating and drinking, with epic breakfasts of meat and ale. And yet a closer examination of life at home with Otto von Bismarck reveals some thoroughly unjunkerly pursuits, such as wide reading in the works of Hegel, Spinoza, Bauer, Feuerbach and Strauss.